Happy New Year to all you Rebels at Work!!

In addition to thinking about how to navigate organizations reluctant to do what’s good for them, I also spend a lot of time thinking about thinking—how to generate and evaluate ideas, how to make sense of difficult situations, how to diagnose correctly problems and potential solutions. I learned many lessons about thinking during my career as a CIA analyst and if you’re curious about them you can check out this talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNv2PlqmsAc&t=10s

But just recently I realized that I hadn’t done a good job incorporating my lessons about good thinking into the advice we provide Rebels at Work. If you’re trying to get your organization and coworkers to support your ideas for change, it’s convenient if your ideas are well-conceived. There are many good thinking practices that will help but, for my money, if I could only recommend one thinking heuristic to rebels, I would point them to the Cynefin framework.

How many of you have heard about the Cynefin framework before? My guess is not many. When I ask  other audiences, including audiences whose primary job is thinking, only a few hands get raised. That’s a shame because the first thing we all should ask ourselves about a situation of concern is whether it’s a simple, complicated, or complex problem.

The Cynefin Framework was developed by a Welshman, David Snowden, in 1999. (Cynefin (kuh-NEV-in) is a Welsh word meaning habitat.) The basic principle is that situations you encounter, problems you are trying to resolve, will fit into one of these four categories. The dark blob in the center represents disorder.

In my career as an intelligence analyst, many catastrophes—big and small—occurred when decision makers assumed the situation they were trying to fix was obvious or at best complicated, when in reality it was complex and perhaps even somewhat chaotic. If a situation is straightforward (the right side of the chart) then cause and effect is clear and, given enough research, effective interventions can be devised. Expertise is usually quite useful in dealing with straightforward problems because knowing more about its variables and causal nodes will get you to a better decision.

But if you’ve misdiagnosed your problem sets, and you’re actually grappling with complex situations, then just about every technique that helps you with simpler problems is actually a hindrance in dealing with complexity. Complex situations are difficult to come to grips with because cause and effect relationships are unclear and/or dynamic, and the best way to navigate them is often through trail and error. One particularly bedeviling characteristic of complex situations is that relying on expertise often leads you astray. The expert thinks she knows how things work and implements solutions that just make things worse. Have any of you lived this scenario?

Applying the Cynefin framework to the problem of organizational change illuminates a persistent pathology: most change initiatives are pursued as if implementation will be complicated, when in fact getting a new idea off the ground is complex and often chaotic. IT implementations are a case in point. IT modernization efforts that never actually saw the light of day were the basso ostinato of my government career.

Both the status quo and Rebels at Work are guilty of underestimating the complexity of whatever they are trying to do. Sometimes, organizations are stuck in a process that requires them to go through a labyrinth of steps that court disaster; rebels presumably have more freedom to improvise. Most change initiatives that rebels lobby for will, I confidently assert, be COMPLEX. (Pretty much anything that involves human reaction and emotions will be COMPLEX, if not chaotic.) That’s why successful Rebels at Work tell us they make the most progress through tiny pivots: taking small steps forward, evaluating the lessons, adjusting when necessary (and it’s always necessary), and then taking another small step.

So the next time you see a problem that is worth solving, ask yourself where it sits on the Cynefin framework. My advice is to assume the situation is complex and demand lots of proof points before you let anyone change your mind.